How many nukes do you REALLY need to destroy the world?

What would happen if a nuclear weapon exploded in close proximity to a working nuclear power plant?

Would the result be the same as just letting off the bomb?

Or would the bomb detonation combined with the presence of functioning nuclear reactors, fuel rods, radioactive waste, etc., cause a bigger
explosion? Chain reaction or dispersion? Fukushima times ten? Or a hundred?

Now what about a nuke going off where other nukes are located? Say a submarine in dock with a dozen nukes on board?

One would think that scientists and the military would have figured this out by now; the effects of a direct nuke strike on a functioning nuclear
power plant. Yet I have never heard of this being discussed.

Thoughts?

If North Korea gets to the point of selling nukes to say, an oil rich country with a grudge. How much damage can one small nuke delivered to a nuclear
installation cause?

The arguement that one needs a working delivery system such as ICBMs and sophisticated guidence systems does not quite make sense when, to my thinking
anyway, a cellphone GPS and a truck would do the job. Don't have a truck? NK has submarines and a lot of nuclear power plants are located on the
coast.

Just one is enough. I just read that modern nukes are up to 50 times stronger than those that exploded in Hiroshima. And several times dangerous than
Chernobyl disaster. And look how is life in Chernobyl now.

They have figured it out you have to have weapons grade materials for a nuclear explosion to occur so aside from causing more radiation, actually
probably not more radiation, detonating a nuke at a nuclear power plant would do absolutely nothing. In fact, not only do you need to have weapons
grade materials, it needs to be compressed to a very strong degree, meaning it has to be completely surrounded by he that is detonated simultaneously.

Lol you would need to fire off thousands or tens of thousands of the biggest nukes to end life on the planet and it still would likely return.

Jaden

Well if we look at that way then that is not true because there were thousands of thousand nukes already used on earth, yet no consequences. I was
thinking of one nuke that is thrown on strategic objects, like for example Wall Street or something like that, something that would change the way we
live. Then one nuke is enough. But if you blow nukes 1000 meters below earth that has zero impact on life above the surface.

The best way to destroy most life on Earth would be to build a massive thermonuclear bomb (with an explosive force many hundreds of times the
magnitude of the largest bombs ever tested) and make it even dirtier than normal in terms of radioactive fallout.

One way would be to surround the bomb with thousands of tons of Cobalt, which would be converted by the bomb's explosion into a radioactive isotope
called Cobalt 60. This substance is particularly deadly, with a half life of 5 years. It would be carried high into the atmosphere and then it'll come
back down as fallout. The winds could spread it out over the planet. That should be enough to kill most reptiles, mammals and birds. I'm unsure how
creatures in the seas would be affected. I doubt whether everything would die.

But that one bomb would have to be monstrous to do that. It'd be more efficient to use dozens of smaller but similar bombs placed in the right places
around the globe. Technically it's completely do-able.

a reply to: Whatsthisthen
I have seen the suggestion (I don't know enough to comment on the science) that a single explosion of a modern nuclear weapon could muck up the whole
atmosphere with side-effects, like puncturing a ballon.

A nuclear weapon striking a nuclear power plant wouldn't necessarily be that much a bigger deal than the nuclear weapon going off itself.

But if you wanted to destroy the world, there have actually been studies done into this. Try Carl Sagan's excellent book 'A Path Where No Man
Thought', which specifically set out to answer this question.

The answer is actually not that many. The trick is to think about the combustables in a modern city. And you only need maybe 30 or 40 strikes on
cities to ignite enough stuff that will put sufficient particulates into the upper atmosphere to trigger a nuclear winter.

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